Gates has already said that he considers Google to be ‘a worthy adversary’, but in order to close the gap between the innovation and new development coming from Google, Microsoft has announced it will be increasing spending (presumably on research and development) by $2 billion next year.
Microsoft’s new IE release has annoyed Google, since it includes a search input field on the toolbar to allow users to search MSN – this is typically where the search input field is placed (or close to) if a user is used to using Firefox, or a browser toolbar plugin in IE, such as the one from Google or Yahoo. Google has made informal complaints with the US Justice Department and EC Anti-trust authorities.